EtherCAT Bridge

The ECX-EC connects two EtherCAT segments. Therefore the EtherCAT bridge implements two seperate EtherCAT slave interfaces for integration into two EtherCAT networks. The bridge allows EtherCAT process data exchange between the networks.

For synchronization of Distributed Clocks (DC) it offers the exact difference between the two slave timestamps as CoE object to allow one master adjusting its time to the other. For DC synchronization in the redundancy case the ECX-EC bridge is used as first and last slave simultaneously, which allows the master to keep all slaves synchronized in both segments.